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Tuesday, October 9, 2012

What’s Cooking in the Furnace?

by William Lynch

Martha Wilson. Photo: Nina Mouritzen

From October 11—13, 2012, BAM will present Brooklyn Bred, a
series of programs curated by Martha Wilson featuring Coco Fusco, Jennifer
Miller, and Dread Scott. Wilson operates
Franklin Furnace Archive, a short walk from the BAM Fisher Building, around the
corner and down Hanson Place.

Franklin Furnace, the storied former art and performance
space, was created in 1976 by Wilson as a repository for artists’ books and a
presentation space for other time-based media such as installation and
performance art. In 1993, its artist
book collection—one of the largest in the world—was acquired by the Museum of
Modern Art. The loft space on Franklin
Street in TriBeCa was sold in 1998 and Franklin Furnace moved to the Financial District
where it remained until 2004, when it moved to Fort Greene, becoming neighbors
with BAM, which is around the time I met Martha. We became instant friends.

Martha is an artist and a smartly-dressed and coiffed woman
with an asymmetrical gray hairdo that usually sports a shock of bright red; she
wears the most fascinating outfits and eyeglasses, making herself a style icon
of the avant-garde. I caught up with
Martha electronically recently and was able to ask her about her work in
preparation for the programs at the BAM Fisher Building.

William Lynch: I must say I love
your organization’s mission “to make the world safe for avant-garde art.” How’s it going, the mission that is?

The Unwritten History Project documents Franklin Furnace’s
past. The goal of this program is to make all of our archival event records
accessible online. We just published on our website 6,000 images documenting
our second decade(1986 to 1995), as well as contributing them to ARTstor, an
online database used by 1500 colleges and universities around the world. These
images join 4,000 images from our first decade for a total of 10,000 images
intended to embed the value of ephemeral art practice in art and cultural
history. So that’s real progress in making the world safe for avant-garde art!

Tell us about what
originally motivated you to create Franklin Furnace. Did you succeed in your
mission? Have your thoughts evolved? How has being a “virtual institution”
changed your work?

Franklin Furnace has transformed three times during its
36-year history to adapt to changing social, political, and economic shifts.
For 20 years, from 1976 to 1996, Franklin Furnace was a presenting organization
located on Franklin Street in Lower Manhattan. But during our second decade,
the “culture wars” over artists’ right to freedom of expression were fought.

Franklin Furnace was right in the middle of that fight, so
viewing the Internet as the next free zone for artistic expression, and as the
value of our loft appreciated, we decided to sell it and “go virtual.” Then as
the turn of the millennium approached, we realized that the record of what
Franklin Furnace had presented could be a research resource of unparalleled
value to art and cultural history, so we started preserving and digitizing the
slides, photographs, video, press releases, announcement cards, posters, and
other materials comprising our physical archives. Now we both give grants to
emerging artists so they may create contemporary avant-garde artworks in other
organizations’ venues, on the street or online; and document this work to make
it accessible worldwide. If you had told me three decades ago that Franklin Furnace
would become both a funder and a research resource I would not have believed
you.

Franklin Furnace is
one of those legendary institutions embedded in our memories as being on the
front lines during the culture wars of the 80s and 90s. Tell us what it was
like to be in the midst of such hostilities. Has the climate for the avant-garde
arts changed significantly for better or worse?

The most difficult part of the culture wars was the economic
drag it placed on the organization. For 10 years, from 1985 to 1995, we were on
NEA grant reimbursement, which means Franklin Furnace raised the money to
present its programs, then submitted a copy of each check stapled to the
invoice and found out later what costs were allowable and which costs were not
based on the application budget written usually two years before. It was a
nightmare, but we never wavered from our belief that artists have been
picturing sexuality for 30,000 years and whatever laws Senator Jesse Helms got
passed, we were not going to tell artists that they could not take sexuality as
a legitimate subject of art.

Nowadays, with the advent of the Internet, artists are
concerned more about surveillance than sexuality. For example, a collaboration
by Joshua Kinberg and Yuri Gitman selected for Franklin Furnace's 2004­—05
season marked the convergence of the body and technology.

Their Magicbike is a mobile WiFi hotspot that provides free
Internet access wherever it travels. A custom-designed printing device mounted
on the bike prints spray-chalk text messages from web users to the surfaces of
the street, overlapping public art with techno-activism by creating a montage
of the community wireless movement, bicycle culture, street demonstrations, and
contemporary art. Theory became practice on August 30, 2004, when the Magicbike
being ridden by Kinberg in preparation for protest at the Republican National
Convention in New York City was impounded by the police on the grounds that
text messages being printed on the street would deface public property and were
therefore subject to laws intended to prohibit graffiti. (Kinberg’s
collaborator, Yuri Gitman, was on the scene with a camera as the arrest took
place. The court case went forward, clearing Kinberg; however, the Magicbike
was “lost” while in the possession of the NYPD.)

Were you surprised
when Joe Melillo asked you to take part in curating the very first season of
the BAM Fisher Building? How did you happen to decide upon Coco Fusco, Jennifer
Miller, and Dread Scott and what draws you to their work?

I was thrilled when I got the call from Joe! We have been colleagues on the downtown scene
for decades but had never worked together. Because Franklin Furnace had made a
commitment to Brooklyn and BAM has been a cultural beacon for 150 years, right
away I decided the artists I selected should be Brooklyn based. Also I decided
the artists I selected should be Franklin Furnace Fund recipients, artists who
are changing cultural discourse through their work. If you come to the Brooklyn
Bred performances, you will see what I mean!

Tell us about other
aspects of Franklin Furnace that our readers may be unaware of. For example, you mentioned making annual
grants to artists. How can each of us support the avant-garde in the broadest
way?

BAM is a big organization, at the top of the artistic food
chain; but there are loads of little organizations in Brooklyn and across the
five boroughs that are doing the important work of giving artists their first
opportunity to show in public so that one day they may show at BAM. On
Saturday, October 6, I impersonated Barbara Bush to deliver the keynote speech
for Art in Odd Places, a festival taking place across 14th Street in Manhattan,
designed to put performance artists in direct contact with witting and unwitting
audience members in an array of social settings from the Meat Packing District
to Stuyvesant Town to Avenue D. We can support the avant-garde by pausing in
our busy tracks to see events that are happening on the street or in public
parks, and to engage with the ideas the artists are presenting. These ideas do
indeed change the way we think! For example, the Italian Futurists’ concept
that the future has value has become the mantra that progress is our most
important product.

Is there anything else
you’d like to tell in preparation for the performances?

No, Dread Scott, Jennifer Miller, and Coco Fusco would kill
me if I divulged their plans! But I can
tell you that each performance will be unique and may change the way you see
the world.

I look forward to
seeing you at the performances. Thanks for sharing your time with us.